The future of solar energy is getting brighter with a new Solar Technology Institute and more ASU researchers becoming involved in new solar technology research.
The Science Foundation Arizona opened the new institute April 17 and presented five new solar initiatives, with collaboration between ASU and UA researchers. The research projects will total $4 million.
“The main goal we have is to develop new disruptive technologies that will decrease the price of solar energy,” said Richard Powell, the co-director of the Solar Technology Institute.
Disruptive technologies are innovative technologies that improve a service or product.
Out of the five projects, several will “improve the efficiency and therefore decrease the price of solar panels,” Powell said.
One project, called the photovoltaic environmental performance and reliability project, will create efficient solar panels.
The project includes research collaboration between ASU and UA, as well as Tucson Electric Power and TUV Rheinland PTL, among other companies. This will expand the ASU Photovoltaic Testing Laboratory in order to work on improving solar panels.
“We need to learn how to do solar energy cheaper,” Powell said.
George Maracas, an electrical engineering and sustainability
professor, works on this project, which is referred to as PEPAR, which stands for the photovoltaic environmental performance and reliability project.
“PEPAR is a project to understand how to improve reliability of photovoltaic modules,” Maracas said.
Those modules are also known as solar panels.
Maracas also works on the AZ Smart project.
“[AZ Smart] is a project [that] analyzes how solar energy can be introduced into the Arizona-wide electric grid,” Maracas said.
He said all these projects are groundbreaking research.
“We are doing things in these projects that have never been done before,” Maracas said.
He said the overall goal is to “build a major solar industry, create new jobs and generate a trained workforce.”
Maracas said researchers would work with solar panels that have already been in place at certain sites for a long time, not with those recently installed on the Tempe campus.
George Basile, director of the Decision Theater at ASU, said the theater is part of the AZ Smart research project.
“[Our goal is to] build tools to understand the implications of solar technology in Arizona,” Basile said.
The Decision Theater will be used as a platform for ideas on solar energy and the planning aspect — like where to put power lines and power generation stations. According to the website, Decision Theater is “A world-class research and decision lab for exploring and understanding decision-making in uncertain systems.”
“We’re hoping to put all these pieces together to move forward the future of solar technology in Arizona,” Basile said.
The theater is a laboratory for making decisions and visualizing those decisions, which in the past have included looking at resources like water and sustainable cities, Basile said.
“[The Decision Theater] is a place where you can bring diverse groups together to explore and collaborate,” he said.
Yong-Hang Zhang, an electrical engineering professor, is the principal investigator for the concentrator solar cells research project.
He said the research project is receiving $500,000 for its first year to develop low-cost solar cells.
“[The goal is] to develop record performance devices for a utility sale [and] power concentration using solar cells to reduce carbon dioxide and any adverse impact on the environment,” Zhang said.
Reach the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu.
